The cops who’re using Flock cameras to supposedly track down criminals and stalk their ex-girlfriends alike are quite literally laughing in our faces as they tap into the all-seeing surveillance panopticon.

According to a new investigation by the Electric Frontier Foundation, a not insignificant number of police officers are submitting nonsense, joke reasons to officially justify the searches they conduct on Flock systems.

One officer with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department wrote “LMAO” in the Flock software’s “reason” box, before searching across more than 19,000 cameras in over 1,500 cities and towns.

The frivolous reasoning is a case in point of why there’s so much outrage over Flock’s AI-powered cameras — which are nominally intended to be licenese plate scanners — and how they’re frequently being abused by cops. Unlike traditional surveillance cameras, Flock’s are part of a centralized network and require no warrants to use. With such little oversight, it’s easy for police officers to conduct sweeping searches for wanton reasons.

In its investigation, which was reported on by 404 Media, the EFF found dozens of examples of cops writing childish responses like “LMAO,” “LOL,” “Hehe,” and “IDK,” in the reason box for Flock searches. 

An alarming number simply button mashed their keyboards. “ghjhghjg,” was a sufficient reason for one officer in Oklahoma to plow through the recordings of over 83,000 cameras. Thousands of others simply wrote uninformative responses like “investigation” and “test.” The odd cop left short little messages, all seemingly unaware that their stated reasons would become public record.

“robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone,” one wrote. 

“f*** this new search engine,” wrote another.

Following up on its findings, the EFF contacted police departments  and found that few, if any, of the cops were meaningfully disciplined for their flippant entries. At most, a few were “counseled,” but by and large the departments tried to deflect and offered excuses.

Flock, conveniently, changed its software in late 2025 so that cops can no longer type in their own “reason.” Now, they’re provided a dropdown list of pre-made reasons instead.  The EFF blasted the move for causing a “loss of transparency,” as it obviously doesn’t encourage cops to be more serious. It merely papers over the fact that they weren’t treating the powerful surveillance tools seriously in the first place.

“This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine,” condemned the EFF in a post about its findings, “permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.”

More on privacy: Trump Throws His Weight Behind Flock Cameras

The post Cops Are Giving Complete Nonsense Reasons to Search Thousands of Flock Cameras appeared first on Futurism.

Waymo called the cops on two youths in San Francisco after catching them handling an assault rifle while in the back of one of its robotaxis, according to local reports. Both passengers, a boy and a girl, have been arrested.

On the morning of September 4, Waymo intervened and pulled over a vehicle after detecting a “violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,” a company spokesperson told the LA Times, after which it alerted emergency services.

Police were called to the scene in the city’s Richmond District just before 4 AM, and conducted a “high-risk vehicle stop,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department told SFGATE.

When officers searched the car, they found a “ghost gun” — an untraceable, homemade firearm assembled from kits or 3D-printed parts — imitating an AR-style assault rifle. They also found, less ominously, some “suspected marijuana and mace spray.”

The young pair were arrested and booked into a juvenile detention center, the spokesperson told SFGATE, and are facing charges related to illegally possessing a firearm. Their ages and identities haven’t been released.

Robotaxis rely on a host of cameras to observe their surroundings, and they also closely monitor what happens inside their cabs, making them an obviously bad choice to take a joyride in or possibly commit crimes. It remains unclear, though, what the teens intended by toting around their makeshift rifle.

This isn’t the first time Waymo has tipped off local law enforcement about its own passengers. In July, it pulled over a car and alerted the San Mateo Police Department after realizing that its riders, two 15-year-old boys, were reportedly drinking in the backseat and shooting water beads out of a toy gun.

There have also been incidents of unruly and possibly illegal behavior in its cars that didn’t lead to arrests. As Waymos and other robotaxis become more popular, rowdy passengers will almost certainly become a more frequent problem.

More on robotaxis: Oops! Many Tesla Cybercabs Actually Do Have Steering Wheels, Undercutting a Core Promise

The post Waymo Calls Cops on Passengers With Assault Rifle appeared first on Futurism.

In Austin, a man’s attempt to be chauffeured out of his hotel in style was foiled when his confused ride couldn’t even pull out of the building.

His ride, of course, was a Tesla Cybercab — Elon Musk’s self-driving, steer-wheeling free robotaxi.

“The Robotaxi arrived… and then couldn’t get out of the hotel parking lot,” the man, who claims to be a computer engineer, wrote on X, posting brief footage of his trip.

As he went on to explain, construction workers had blocked off one of the lanes. And the gleaming gold Cybercab, in all its canny computing power, couldn’t see the other lane that was left open.

He never made it to his destination, but he did arrive at a destination, albeit rather unceremoniously. The Cybercab “drove back and forth four times,” he said, “and then stopped and said I had arrived!”

“Not a great first experience!” he concluded. “Clearly this technology is nowhere close to being ready for large scale deployment.”

So I arrived in Austin and decided to take a robotaxi ride into work..

The Robotaxi arrived… and then couldn’t get out of the hotel parking lot. There was construction in one lane.. but it couldn’t see the other open lane. It drove back and forth 4 times and then stopped and… pic.twitter.com/101F04Al9n

— PK (@paul_k_0907) September 15, 2026

Tesla rolled out its two-seater Cybercabs in Austin earlier this month, after years of anticipation. The company had already operated a Robotaxi service in the city for over a year using modified Model Ys, but the Cybercab represents its first purpose-built robotaxi — and with its complete lack of driver controls like steering wheels and pedals, its no-turning-back commitment to pursuing genuine human-free driving. (Many of its Robotaxis still requiring a human safety monitor inside the car, something the company is clearly conscious about.)

It hasn’t made quite the splash that Tesla may have hoped, however, with many investors underwhelmed by the Cybercab’s launch. While the golden cars haven’t been involved in any high profile incidents yet, the software’s autonomous capabilities haven’t stacked up impressively next to robotaxi leader Waymo. The company is also being investigated by federal regulators over how it self-certified that the vehicles were safe for the road despite their lack of conventional controls.

The Cybercab’s hotel misfire is part of a long chain of weird behavior by Tesla’s robotaxis. Customers — many of whom are Tesla enthusiasts and boosters — complain that they often pick up and drop them off at inconvenient locations, ranging from the middle of busy intersections to hidden alleys, or at absurd distances from their actual destination.

Still, Tesla boosters have been hard at work trying to hype up the cars. Roughly a week before a Cybercab got trapped at a hotel, another Tesla account posted a video bragging about how a Cybercab picked them up from their own hotel. 

“You’ll feel like a VIP getting into this car!” he extolled.

More on Tesla: Cybercabs Are Taking Psychotic Routes That Turn Tiny Trips Around the Neighborhood Into Hour-Long Nightmares

The post Bumbling Cybercab Gets Trapped in Hotel Parking Lot, Drops off Passenger Right Where He Started appeared first on Futurism.

If you ever feel like spilling your guts to ChatGPT, just know that you may have an audience.

404 Media reports that OpenAI is hiring hundreds of employees to sift through and read users’ prompts — including messages that contain sensitive personal information.

This isn’t part of a moderation effort. Instead, by reviewing the prompts, OpenAI hopes to improve the responses that ChatGPT gives. The contractors rate and critique each of the AI’s replies, with internal documents showing a focus on nudging ChatGPT away from anthropomorphizing itself and to be less sycophantic, 404 found.

Both qualities — anthropomorphizing and sycophancy —  have been heavily scrutinized for their role in so-called AI psychosis, cases in which an AI incites and drives a user’s delusional behavior. Numerous lawsuits allege that an older, less restrained version of ChatGPT powered by GPT-4o drove their users to suicide.

Still, there are tradeoffs. Many users would probably find this surveillance of their chats, part of an operation dubbed “Project Lily,” to be an alarming invasion of privacy — if they had any idea this was happening.

Asked if they thought ChatGPT users knew about humans reading their chats, one of the employees replied: “No.”

“I don’t think they would imagine some contractor somewhere… is analyzing the conversations,” they told 404.

It’s unclear how many prompts are being read or how OpenAI decides to select them. But some of them include chats in which the user explicitly asks ChatGPT to keep their conversations private, 404 found.

The prompts that’re selected are anonymized, but sometimes include personal information. The dashboard that the employees use also includes a “user memories summary” that can give details about previous conversations, which can produce details on where the user lives. When 404 reached out to OpenAI, the company said it used a “Privacy Filter” model to anonymize conversations, which its website states “can make mistakes.”

OpenAI could reasonably be accused of acting quite shifty about this practice. It’s well known at this point that it has employees read messages for moderation and safety purposes. But it didn’t respond to 404’s question about if it explicitly told users that humans are reading prompts to improve the AI. Later, after 404 published its piece, it pointed to a page on its website stating that humans may review prompts to “improve model performance.” Users can opt-out of this practice by turning off the “improve the model for everyone” setting, but this is enabled by default.

Michal Luria, a senior research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told 404 that while human review can be “essential to safety,” she noted that “chatbot interfaces automatically create a false sense of intimacy and privacy.”

“This is quite distinct from content moderation on social media, where publishing content already carries expectations of platform moderation and public exposure,” Luria added. 

In any case, it does seem like OpenAI is feeling conscious about how its AI models sound. Employees, for example, flagged and wrote down cases of “AI-speak” and “unnecessary use of emojis,” which are common tell-tales of chatbot usage. 

“It would be appropriate to include a tree emoji when planning Arbor Day celebrations,” a document given to the employees explained, “but skull emojis when discussing death, or plane emojis when giving updates on a fatal crash, are not.”

The iceberg may go deeper. An FAQ section provided to the reviewers says that they don’t need to worry about fact-checking the responses, and alludes to other project teams that “handle content verification.”

More on OpenAI: OpenAI Faces Congressional Probe Over Swarm Hacking Incident

The post OpenAI Has Hundreds of Workers Reading People’s Private Chats appeared first on Futurism.

AI is supposedly going to kill us all, but at least it’s doing wonders for the stocks for a few multibillion-dollar companies.

Mounting fears over the technology’s existential risks reached a fever pitch over the weekend, tanking AI chip stocks across the globe. 

This earthshattering discussion had a curious aftershock, though. Instead of double-checking their fortified bunkers, investors poured even more money into Microsoft, Google, and Meta Platforms — the biggest AI hyperscalers, or companies that operate the largest data centers — which were up by more than two percent on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported. All remain up by a few percentage points over the past five days.

These gains may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, but they did result in the WSJ publishing what CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers called a “subhead for the ages.” 

“Talk of heading off artificial intelligence’s potential role in destroying humanity hurt some stocks and helped others,” it read. There are winners and losers in every scenario, in other words — including humanity’s extinction.

Fears that AI advancements could spell doom for our species have been running high after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week and accused the company of “gambling with our lives,” sending shockwaves through the tech industry. 

Coxon’s warning came after months of leading AI labs, including Anthropic, each coming out to say that their powerful agentic systems had been able to break out of containment and launch cyberattacks in the real world.

Talk of slowing down AI development quickly spread from Silicon Valley to Washington, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei intensified these calls on Saturday in a lengthy essay urging other AI companies to cooperate. Elon Musk, who runs SpaceXAI, and Sam Altman, the CEO OpenAI, both came out in agreement.

Some experts are skeptical of these apocalyptic claims from AI leaders, wondering if there might be an ulterior motive. The likes of Anthropic have long been accused of using fear-mongering as a marketing tactic. Whatever’s going on, it seems that the industry is doing its best to keep the narrative around the tech within its control.

More on AI: Bernie Sanders Proposes Banning Superintelligent AI and Imprisoning Developers for 20 Years

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